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Thursday, August 8, 2013

Journey by Aaron Becker

When
a young girl is desperate for some attention from her family but they appear to be too wrapped up in their own lives to notice her, she draws herself into an imaginary land and can get herself out of
any predicament with just a few lines drawn from a magical red crayon.

Journey is an
absolutely stunning, heart-skipping wordless picture book. It will make you gasp at its beauty and feats of imagination. It is probably my
favorite wordless picture book of all time. Can someone say Caldecott? I just did. There's a
perfect spot for the sticker on the left side - all that sky is just
begging for an award sticker to be placed upon it.What is so captivating about this picture book is the variety of influences you see in Becker's art, namely the Eastern influences, especially on the first full page spread where our protagonist enters the land of her imagination and you see paper lanterns strewn about the forest.

But truly, this book can be summed up by reading Aaron Becker's biography on the back flap:

Aaron
Becker has made several memorable journeys in his lifetime. He's lived
in rural Japan and East Africa, backpacked through Sweden and the South
Pacific, and, most recently, ventured from San Fancisco Bay to Amherst,
Massachusetts, the town he and his wife, daughter, and lazy cat now call
home. To this day, his favorite destination remains his imagination,
where he can often be found drawing secret doorways and magic lanterns.

LOVE that. Especially because, despite the fact that the journey in this book is by that of a young girl, it still felt very much like a personal journey for the illustrator. So reading his bio at the end didn't surprise me at all. This book really is his journey.